Advice
by BiteMarks
Summary: Josef seeks advice from an unusual source when he has a troubling dilemma concerning Mick and Beth.


**Advice**

**.**

The young man gave the soft leather couch a disdainful glance and settled himself into the armchair opposite the old man instead. An array of degrees hung on the wall strategically opposite his chair. _Reassurance for the anxious, no doubt_. His lips were cocked in a half smile as if this were some cosmic joke, his very presence here somehow ridiculous, but the way in which his thumb and forefinger smoothed along the razored crease of his trousers betrayed an inner tension.

"The first thing you need to know is that I'm a vampire."

The old man regarded the youth with kindly curiosity.

"I see," he said. "Do you mean that literally or metaphorically?"

"Well, I'm not the kind of 'bloodsucker' you must usually deal with," the young man said with a half smile. "I'm no guilt-ridden lawyer making a million bucks a year by foreclosing on the homes of the working class and wanting someone to hold my hand and make me feel alright about it. And I'm not some whacked out emo writing Twilight fanfic on the weekend either."

"You want me to know that you're the real deal."

"Yes." The young man seemed surprised by the old man's composure. "But I haven't come to talk about myself. I'm here for some advice. For the first time in a very long time something's happened that leaves me _unsure_ of myself and I have no one else to talk to. I can't just go anywhere, I have a reputation to uphold, and my people tell me you're the best."

Needing some independent advice about a sensitive issue wasn't such an uncommon reason for entering therapy, the old man thought, especially when a person was in a powerful position as this man so obviously was. He sat back in his chair and said, "Go on."

For the first time the young man appeared slightly ruffled. "This isn't about me, you understand." He leaned forward in his chair and held the old man's gaze as if to emphasize the point. "You need to understand that I'm not here to talk about me. It's my 'friend' who ultimately has the issue."

"Your 'friend'," the old man said. "I see."

"We're like blood brothers," the young man said, raising his eyebrows and giving an innocent-looking smile. "The poor sap has been obsessed with a younger woman for years and recently had the good fortune to discover that said lady returns his regard. I know, I sound a little sour. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for them, I really am." The younger man stopped, looked out the window. "The problem is, my friend's woman is a human."

It was clear there was more to the story so the old man waited for him to continue.

"And she's asked me very nicely to turn her."

"Turn her?"

"Make her like me, my friend. Immortality, eternal life and all that. You know the drill."

"So, she believes you're a .. –"

" - .. an unholy bloodsucking creature of the night, like I said. Yeah."

The old man thought about that.

"Let me get this clear. If the young lady believes that you're a vampire like you say are, that means by asking to be 'turned' she's requesting that you kill her?"

That gave the younger man pause. He smoothed the sharp edge of his trousers.

"In a way. Yes."

"And you're here because you're wondering whether or not to go along with it, to do as she wishes and end her life."

The young man shrugged agreement.

"Let me ask you this, then… If you are a vampire, as you say, then killing is what your kind do. Your raison d'etre as it were."

The younger man began to nod.

"I see where you're going with this. Killing her isn't the problem. I think she'd make a fine addition to the family. She has the balls to front me, for Christ's sake and not many people, human or vampire, can do that. No, the problem isn't any compunction of mine about taking her human life, my concern is how my friend might take it if I do."

"Your friend is opposed to the notion of your killing the girl."

"He has an inconvenient set of morals."

The old man digested that in silence. Eventually he said,

"And you're concerned that if you do this thing, you'll lose his friendship."

"Exactly. He's my only real friend and I'm wanting to know how he might react if I assent to his lady's wishes."

The young man looked sane enough. His logic and reasoning were sound, there was no evidence of any formal thought disorder in his speech and by the obvious success conveyed by his appearance, he was a very high functioning individual indeed. Together these ruled out the presence of an acute schizophrenic illness. However, there was no doubt that he believed with absolute conviction the tale he was telling about being a vampire, and that raised the issue that he may be suffering from either a delusional disorder or a dissociative personality disorder. If he were dealing with a dissociative personality disorder, it was likely that the 'friend' the young man referred to was himself. If the young man was delusional, it was entirely possible that the young lady in question was a figment of his imagination. The possibility remained, however, that somewhere out there was a very real victim in waiting. Either way he needed to know more about the young man in front of him before he could gauge the level of risk he might pose to himself or others. He had to keep the young man talking.

"That's a complex question. I'd need to know more about your 'friend' before I could hazard an opinion."

The younger man sighed.

"It's the classic story. He was a young man full of promise but he was the wrong man at the wrong time. He fell for a woman who was no good. High maintenance? This girl makes Naomi Campbell look like Carol Brady."

"Go on."

"He proposed, they married and on their wedding night she turned him."

"She .. killed him?"

"She killed the man he had been."

The old man sat up a little straighter. Somehow this was the first real statement of psychological truth he thought he'd heard that night.

"And what sort of man was that?"

The young man frowned in concentration.

"I only knew him after he'd been turned. But from what I can gather, he was the boy next door. Always did his homework, never late for church on Sunday. The kid everyone in the neighbourhood trusted to walk their eight-year-olds home from school and never to cheat on the change when delivering groceries to your grandma."

"A decent human being, in other words."

"Yes."

"Not the sort who falls for the wrong kind of young woman."

"Not then."

The young man paused, his expression wistful, as if looking back with nostalgia on the past he'd just described.

"But something happened to change all that," the old man prompted.

The young man winced. "He wasn't the first young man in history to have the stuffing knocked out of him by war."

The was a long pause which the older man was reluctant to interrupt. At last the young man spoke again.

"He doesn't talk about it, but I know he saw some things, did some things that made him feel bad, dirty, as if he would never be clean again. By all accounts he was a changed man when he returned. He was restless, looking for trouble."

"And he found it."

The bark of laughter was unpleasant. "In beautiful, blood-sucking spades! And he liked it. Liked it so much he married it."

"As you said, when he decided to give himself to this woman, everything about the man he had been, every good thing ceased to exist. At least that's what he told himself. What was it that attracted him to her?"

"What wasn't there to like?" The young man's eyes glazed and the ends of his lips fluttered as if a smile were trying to emerge. "She was beautiful. By God, but she was beautiful. She was by far the loveliest creature he'd ever seen. She did things to him that would have made a whore blush and she pushed him to his limits, beyond his limits, daring him to go further than he'd ever dreamed. No law, no rule, no moral held her back from getting exactly what she wanted," he said with admiration. "And she wanted him."

"You loved her."

The young man looked startled, as if that insight were unexpected.

"I did once," he said softly, "but as I said, this isn't my story."

The older man paused. "Of course not. What happened then?"

"And then he was a very bad little boy, for a very, very long time."

"So the young man went off to war and did terrible things, things he never would have conceived possible in his other life, things perhaps that made him feel separate from the rest of the human race, a monster perhaps. This young man, feeling tainted as he did by his military experiences, found a woman who not only wasn't repelled by the darkness inside him, but revelled it, perhaps even encouraged it, echoing as it did the darkness within her."

The young man's eyebrows shot up and he listened intently as the old man went on.

"When he was with her he didn't have to hide the damage that had been done to him, he didn't have to smile and pretend that he was still the innocent boy the neighbourhood remembered, the one who believed in mom and pop and good always triumphing over evil."

The young man regarded him with a look of intense concentration on his face. "That would explain a lot."

The old man cocked his head in query.

"Why he couldn't break away. Why he couldn't make it stick when he tried to leave her. Oh he tried," the young man nodded when he saw the older man's raised eyebrows. "Eventually. But she was like an addiction. A dark, exciting malaise so deep inside his gut he couldn't do without her." The young man paused. "But you know addictions. They pall."

"So the good in him hadn't been entirely eradicated."

The young man nodded. "Guess the altar boy in him wasn't completely out for the count at that, because when she turned him it was as if she forced him over the one limit he didn't want to cross." He paused. "He didn't want to kill again. He wanted to forget the reproachful look in their eyes as they died, the smell of their blood in the air."

A strange pathology, some unspecified psychotic disorder perhaps, was definitely present in this young man and the rich symbolism of the vampire metaphor was too powerful to ignore. He'd need to use the young man's language if he wanted to build a bridge between them.

"So once he was 'turned' he could never, ever escape that look, ever escape the smell of blood. He could never escape the guilt, if you will. He was trapped in a living nightmare."

"For eternity. He was bound to her by blood and with blood and it sickened him. So now he loved her _and_ he hated her, and the more he killed the more he hated her. In the end all that was left was the hate."

" And what happened then?"

"Then he started a fire, saved a damsel in distress and got 'religion'."

"The 'damsel', I presume, being the young lady in question today."

"Yes."

"And the 'religion'? He stopped being a 'vampire'?"

The young man hooted with laughter. "Now there's an accusation he wouldn't be unfamiliar with. I guess if drinking bagged blood and helping humans find their missing poodles qualifies a card carrying member of the undead for ex-vampire status then yeah, he stopped playing for us black hats quite some time ago."

It was becoming clearer why the young man had come to him today. He was trying to find a way back from the dark place he'd been lost in.

"Tell me about the young lady."

"She's beautiful, blonde, feisty but sweet, caring, ethical. He's looked after her from afar for years. Cherished her. Since her childhood, in fact. My friend feels very _protective_ of her."

"In essence, she's the girl next door."

The young man nodded. It seemed clear to the old man that the two women represented two different aspects of the young man's psyche.

"You say this man is a 'vampire' like you, but that he eschews the values that vampires live by. His wife personified the darkness in him, the damage to his psyche that desperately needed healing and was expressed by his acting out and behaving badly. The young lady, could we speculate, personifies the 'human' side of him, the side that was taken forcibly from him by war, that part of him he yearns for and wants badly to return to. He wants to reconnect with the healthy and undamaged remnants in his psyche and this young lady makes him feel that this is possible."

The young man was speechless. The old man sat back in his chair, allowing his analysis to do its work. In his opinion there was no 'friend', the allusion was a smoke screen that allowed the proud young man to enter therapy and disclose his inner secrets 'safely', by attributing his difficulties to someone else. The young man before him had undoubtedly experienced multiple traumas, had behaved in ways that stoked the darkness and of which now he was becoming ashamed.

"It would seem then, that the answer to your question about your _friend's_ reaction to 'turning' his girlfriend is quite clear. This young woman is of extreme psychological importance to him. 'Turning' her into what he despises about himself, even at her request, would be tantamount to executing the last remaining kernel of human decency in himself, terminating the last remaining possibility that he can be the good person he once was again. She is his reason for getting up in the morning. If she were 'turned'..." The old man locked eyes with the young man opposite. "..he would never recover from it."

The young man looked crestfallen. "You mean if I turned her he'd not only be a killjoy for the next decade or two, but probably for _forever_? I thought if she was one of us it would give him the chance to be both a better man _and_ a better vampire."

The old man shook his head in disagreement with the last part of the young man's statement. "You say he's protected her since childhood? He values her innocence. She represents his _own_ innocence, his pre-wartime self. My guess would be that your friend has steadfastly resisted his desire to consummate his feelings for the young woman. To do that would be to sully the one thing that reminds him of what he wants to be, what he could be if only he denied himself from acting on his darker impulses. To engage in a sexual relationship with her would be to accept that his moral and emotional decline, his 'vampirism', as you call it, is permanent."

The young man sat up, looking cheerful again. "You mean, all it would take for him to accept who he is now, vampire and all, would be to stop acting like he was head cheerleader for the local monastery, give in and sleep with her?"

"Yes, I believe so."

The young man grinned. "Thanks for your advice, Doc. Maybe there's something to this shrink stuff after all."

The young man took a chequebook out of the inner pocket of his jacket and signed his name with a flourish. The old man looked up quizzically. The cheque had been made out to his wife and the amount was for over five thousand times his usual hourly rate.

"Compensation," the young man said as he stood and smoothed the front of his jacket, "for your family. My friend and I are both vampires but we disagree on many things." The young man's face looked sombre. "Our viewpoints on the sanctity of human life, for instance."

The old man felt a chill against his cheekbones.

The young man strode from the room and standing in the doorway he'd just vacated were, the old man saw, two beautiful young women both dressed from head to toe in shiny skin-tight black leather.

.

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End file.
